First select which events you want to see. If you want to see individual Table events, select the Table of interest, or All Tables. Select No Tables if you don't want to see any individual Table events.
If you want to see other types of events, such as Area, National or Public events, select All events or just Area events as appropriate. Selecting Nothing will show only the events of the selected Table (if any).
If you select Chairman's Diary, that's all you get; this selection overrides all the other settings.
Finally select the month you want to see, and click on Display.
Before you can change the Diary, you need to have a valid UserName and Password. If you don't have one, please contact the Webmaster or the Area Secretary. Each Table has one unique userID allocated. Armed with this information, click on the "Edit" link in the sidebar.
The diary works on a monthly basis. Immediately after logging-in, you'll see a list of diary dates for the current month. To view a different month, select the month and year at the top of the form, and press [List]. Each entry in the diary has a select-button in the left-most column.
When you have the required month displayed, you can make changes to it, using the following buttons:
Adds a new diary entry. If you have selected an existing entry, the form will be initialised with the same contents.
Deletes the selected entry. Does nothing useful if no entry is selected.
Modifies an existing entry. It is possible to change a date without having to delete one entry and add the new one.
There is a pre-defined selection of silly icons to embellish your diary entry. Please send in any requests for additional graphics.
If you don't do anything for about 15 minutes, you will be logged off! You will have to re-enter your userID details to log back on. Once back on, you can use your browser's [Back] button to get back to any form you may have been submitting, and re-submit it.
It is possible to link to the diary from another site in such a way that only details for your own Table are listed, plus Area and National events. In addition, you can specify certain aspects of the appearance to tie in better with your own Table's site.
Here is an example of such a link, taken from the Wotton site (split into lines so you can read it; in practice it's one long line).
<A HREF="http://www.area23.org.uk/cgi-bin/diary.cgi?
table=Wotton-under-Edge+%26+District&
bg=http://www.rt974.freeserve.co.uk/watermrk.gif&
style=http://www.rt974.freeserve.co.uk/main.css&
link=http://www.rt974.freeserve.co.uk/diary">See Our Diary</A>
What does that all mean!?
Everything up to the ? is a standard URL, except that in this case it links to a CGI program instead of an HTML page. A CGI program is a program which runs on the Web Server, and generates an HTML page on-the-fly.
Everything after the ? is passed to the CGI program, and provides instructions to the CGI program. This stuff is broken up into pairs of instructions of the form parameter=value. Each pair is separated by the & character. The parameters understood by the CGI program are:
List only events for a specific Table (including any area or public events etc., hosted by that Table). If this parameter is missing, events for all Tables will be listed
Define a background image; in the example it's taken from Wotton's own site. If you don't define one, you'll get a white background.
Define a stylesheet. This allows some formatting of the text font and colour of parts of the Diary page. Again, in this case it links to a .css (cascading stylesheet) page on Wotton's site. If you omit the style parameter, you'll get the default Area23 one.
At the bottom of each Diary page, there is a link shown as [ Return ]. If you click on this, it takes you to the place defined by the link parameter. In this case, it takes you back to the Wotton site. The Target is the same frame as the Diary is in (i.e. _self). If you don't do this, the link will be replaced with the standard Area23 navigation bar, which almost certainly isn't what you want.
You can request a specific month to be displayed, by setting the date with the year and month parameters. A date isn't specified in the above example, so the current month will be displayed by default.
It's possible to select only certain types of diary entries for display. These events get added to any events already selected by the table parameter. For example, you may want to display your own Table entries plus any other Area entries. The type parameter allows this. It consists of a string of characters, made up as follows:
- t Table entries (see below)
- a Area entries (e.g. Area Pub Games)
- n National entries (e.g. National Sporting Weekend)
- i International entries (e.g. WACO).
- p Public entries (e.g. Firework displays)
- c Chairman's diary entries (overrides all other entries).
For example, setting type=np will display all National and Public events in addition to events selected via the table parameter. If the type parameter includes 't', this has the effect of selecting all Table events, but not including Area and Public events hosted by that Table (probably not very useful in practice).
The default setting for type (i.e. if you leave it blank) is "anip". To exclude all non-table events, you can use type=x.
For your own Table diary, you probably want to set the table parameter, but leave the type parameter unset (to show only events relating to your own Table). Alternatively, set the table parameter, and set type to "na", which will show your own events, plus all Area and National events but no public or international events.
Notes:
The table parameter is used to select which Table entries will be displayed. It is simply a match string (non-case sensitive). In the above example, wotton would work just as well as Wotton-under-Edge+%26+District. The only difference is that the name you specify is what gets displayed at the top of the Diary page. So er-Ed would also work, but looks a bit silly. The %26 is the hex encoding of the & character. You can't use the & character as normal, because it is used in URLs to separate the parameter=value pairs. Also, spaces need to be replaced with + signs. These are standard URL metacharacter encoding rules.
To edit your diary, you only need to go to the Area 23 website and change the Area Diary itself, since a specific Table's diary is simply extracted form the main Area23 diary.
The custom AOL browser has been known to have problems when editing the diary. The symptom is that you are repeatedly requested to enter your username and password. The reason is that the AOL browser can cause your IP address to change from one click to the next (most ISPs give you just one IP address for the whole session).
The best workaround for this is to use a different browser. Connect to AOL as normal, but then minimise the AOL browser and start up Internet Explorer (or Mozilla Firefox or Netscape). Then use this browser to edit the diary.
Any problems, please e-mail Mike Davison at miked@symboliq.co.uk.